UCI Granted $500,000 for Alzheimer’s Study

UC Irvine has received a $500,000 unrestricted grant from the Bristol-Myers Co. to pay for a five-year research project on prevention of Alzheimer’s disease, university officials said Tuesday.

A team headed by Carl Cotman, director of the UCI Neuroscience Assn., was one of five university groups picked for the first year of the company’s grants program.

Other universities receiving grants are Yale University, Cornell Medical Center, UC San Diego and Johns Hopkins University, UCI officials said.

Cotman, a nationally renowned psychobiology investigator, accepted the grant Tuesday at ceremony in Washington, officials said.

“The intent of the program is to support the efforts of scientists at the leading edge of neuroscience research who are making significant contributions to science and medicine in this rapidly evolving field,” Bristol-Myers chairman Richard Gelb said in a prepared statement.

Cotman has been a pioneer in research into the brain and its chemistry. He is trying to prevent the loss of brain cells that occurs in Alzheimer’s patients, a loss that results in the progressive deterioration of mental functions and eventual memory loss.

In 1982, a UCI research team headed by Cotman made what fellow scientists termed the “incredibly significant discovery” that the degenerative effects of Alzheimer’s disease may be reversible. Cotman’s team found that remaining brain cells will try to assume the functions of the lost cells.

The Bristol-Myers financial award is the second large grant Cotman’s team has received this month. On May 9, his group was awarded a $190,000 grant from the American Health Assistance Foundation’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Program.